President Barack Obama won’t be able to enjoy much of a victory lap from his win over congressional Republicans on the fiscal cliff fight.

There are about 16.4 trillion reasons why.

The staggering national debt — up about 60 percent from the $10 trillion Obama inherited when he took office in January 2009 — is the single biggest blemish on Obama’s record, even if the rapid descent into red began under President George W. Bush.

Obama has long emphasized Bush’s role in digging the immense hole. But he owns it now, and it’s a significant political liability as he girds for a fast-approaching brawl with the GOP over how to deal with converging deadlines of a new debt ceiling fight and the need to come up with $1 trillion in deficit reduction mandated by the so-called “sequester.”

“The numbers — at some point it’s got to catch up or else we’re all going to die,” said Chris Chocola, head of the anti-tax Club for Growth, which opposed the cliff deal. “We have serious problems that are going unaddressed and we’re moving in the wrong direction.”

Obama was able to splinter his deeply divided Republican opponents over the issue of tax cuts for the wealthy. But a similar fate might await the president and his Democratic allies if he brokers a deal with the GOP that requires massive spending and entitlement cuts.

During the cliff talks, Obama was purposely opaque about what cuts he’d ultimately accept, saying only that Republican resistance to a one-shot grand bargain meant he needed to make a deal in pieces — taxes first, spending second.

That tactic delayed but didn’t eliminate a looming day of reckoning on spending and entitlements that will come within 60 days thanks to the convergence of the debt ceiling deadline and the new deadline for keeping automatic cuts from kicking in.

“Republicans — and some Democrats — want to curtail Social Security, veterans benefits, Medicare and Medicaid — that’s not a secret — and some of us are going to be fighting to say no,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), author of a letter sent by 29 Senate Democrats in September demanding Obama back off chained CPI, which would reduce Social Security increases indexed to inflation.

“It is absolutely imperative the president and Democratic leadership stay strong on this issue. If they do, we will win,” added Sanders, who wants the president to aggressively push for tax hikes and loophole elimination on corporations.

Former Clinton administration official Alice Rivlin, a member of Obama’s defunct deficit commission, says Obama “understands the [deficit-reduction] issue” but “he’s got to deal with his own left wing, which is not enthusiastic about doing it. The real problem … is that Social Security has become kind of [a] no-no” to liberals.

In a video message to his 2012 campaign supporters released Wednesday, Obama offered few specifics on how he’d approach the coming fight. He reiterated his call for a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction despite a cliff deal that contains only a few billion in cuts and may add hundreds of billions to the debt in coming decades, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

His one reference to budget and entitlement cuts was retrospective — referring to the $1 trillion in discretionary spending reductions, phased in over 10 years, he agreed to last year as part of the debt ceiling pact.

Conservatives, for their part, are hoping to regroup after their cliff dive, and quickly. The Club for Growth is hoping to retrench for the next battle, even though the club’s former president, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), voted for the fiscal cliff deal.

Now that Obama has his tax hike on the wealthy, “all the stories are going to say there’s no deficit reduction and you got what you wanted and it didn’t work. At some point, the questions are going to be asked and the charade will be revealed,” Chocola said.

By squeezing $600 billion in tax hikes on the rich out of the GOP, Obama, in effect, ate his dessert first.

Now comes the eat-your-peas part: A united GOP is in no mood to offer a dollar more in tax hikes, as Obama hopes to extract in the upcoming talks. If he wants to avoid draconian domestic and defense cuts, he’ll likely have to compromise. That might mean accepting tens of billions more in spending and entitlement cuts beyond those he’s already laid out.

Obama and his team has said they won’t negotiate over the debt ceiling again after last year’s fiasco, which led to a national credit downgrade. But by extending the sequester for a scant two months, they have guaranteed that fight will happen, several White House allies said.

“I think that a lot of his leverage is gone,” said a top aide to a senior Hill Democrat involved in the negotiations over the fiscal cliff. “By agreeing to a short-term deal, he’s set up a flashpoint with Democrats.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Obama’s surprise ally on the fiscal cliff fight, laid down the marker on Wednesday: No more taxes.

“Democrats now have the opportunity — and the responsibility — to join Republicans in a serious effort to reduce Washington’s out-of-control spending,” McConnell said in a statement intended as a shot across the Obama bow.

“That’s a debate the American people want. It’s the debate we’ll have next. And it’s a debate Republicans are ready for. … And now that he has the tax rates he wants, his calls for ‘balance’ mean he must join us in our efforts to achieve meaningful spending and government reform. We have an immediate opportunity to act: the debt ceiling.”

Anti-tax hawk Grover Norquist, who reluctantly backed Tuesday’s deal, predicted that GOP senators and House members were so embittered by the cliff fight, they won’t allow Obama to beat them twice.

“Now you think they’re going to raise taxes for you, that’s never happening,” he told POLITICO. “You knocked them down and mugged them once, they’re not going out on a date with you a second time.”

Whether that’s bluster or a fair reading of the mood on the Hill, the next deal will likely come down to brinkmanship again, the rolling game of Russian roulette played out every half-year or so, with trillions of debt in the kitty.

In the end, Republican leadership — including House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) were unwilling to push the country over the fiscal cliff.

To extract a tough bargain out of Obama in a few weeks, they have to be willing to take responsibility for allowing the debt ceiling to stand, which could send interest rates rocketing and financial markets plummeting.

“I think Obama is holding almost all the cards now and if there is entitlement reform, I think he’s outlined what he will be able to do, which is change the [Social Security cost-of-living index], as a practical matter he still thinks the vast majority of deficit reduction should come in the way of new revenues,” said Judd Gregg, a fiscally conservative former Republican senator from New Hampshire who also served on Obama’s Simpson-Bowles commission.

“His first goal is to grow the government to the point that it is addressing what he sees as the social injustices in our society. … I think he thinks America is just an unjust country and that injustice can only be corrected by the federal government.”

If there’s a way out of the Groundhog Day impasse, it will likely come by reviving the moribund grand bargain — with its promise of a broad bipartisan deal on rewriting the country’s antiquated corporate and personal tax codes.

“I hope what he’s thinking is basically a return to the grand bargain idea,” said Rivlin, referring to the deal Obama had hoped to complete with Boehner in 2011.

“I interpreted the president when he talked about additional revenues as meaning the additional revenues from reforming the tax system, which had been part of the original idea of a grand bargain.”